So you have an urge to make something requiring overripe bananas, like banana bread, or my german chocolate cake. But you don’t have any overripe bananas, and you don’t want to wait a few days to ripen them in a paper bag. It happens. Luckily the magic of science has provided us with a solution to take regular or even slightly underripe bananas and get them where we want them in an hour.

Simply spread your bananas (with the peels ON, please) on a cookie sheet and pop them in the oven at 300 degrees for an hour. Yeah, really, that’s all it takes. They will come out looking frighteningly black:

But don’t worry, on the inside they are nice and soft and sweet. The heat from the oven activates the sugars in the banana, simulating the ripening process. You can stick them in the fridge for a few minutes until the bananas are cool enough to handle, and then peel them open and see, not burnt at all! Just soft and ready to mash into whatever recipe you’ve got a hankering to make.

This doesn’t work with completely green bananas – they do need to be at least mostly ripe to get the desired results. But since they are usually close to ripe when you buy them, this shaves off a few days of waiting! How many of you already knew this trick? Anyone have any other simple kitchen tips that save time or effort to share? I’m always looking for new pointers!

I’ve never done this before! I always have bananas on hand and I let them ripen and buy more as needed. I use a lot for smoothies and such so I like to have the ripe speckled bananas. Speckled ones are best for smoothies, and very soft squishy black bananas are the best for baking.

If you need to replace oil or eggs in a recipe and you don’t have bananas you can also peel and chop an apple and blend with a little water for a raw apple sauce you can use right away as well.

I have a guide on how to tell if bananas are ripe and when they are at the best taste for eating and recipes

Wow, how interesting! Those black bananas do look a bit freaky, though.

One tip I found out that has really made things easier for me is to partially cook butternut or kabocha or other squashes before cutting. I just wash the squash, poke a few holes in the top and pop in the oven (at whatever temp–325, 350, 400F) until I can easily stick a knife in it, but it is not yet mushy. I then take it out of the oven, let it cool for a few minutes and then cut and peel it as a I normally would. Once it’s cut up how I want it I just roast it, steam it, toss it in a stew…whatever the recipe calls for… to finish cooking.

Well, that is a new trick. But, since we have our own banana palms, and the weather is getting hot…104 deg. F yesterday…I can save on the oven. BUT, do like the idea of a quick way to ‘ripen’ them in the winter time. Thanks.

Hi:
I needed ripe bananas to make ice cream so I tried your oven trick. It worked but an hour was way to long. I checked on them after 30 minutes and even that might have been to long. The next time I’ll try a lower temp an check on them every 10 minutes. It’s a very good idea, thanks.

Great idea to put in the oven. I had been putting them on top of stove as the oven baked other dishes to speed up the ripening. That does speed up the rippening as well ,but not it is a much slower process.

My sister has the flu and asked me to bake her a loaf of my banana bread. I learned years ago that banana bread tastes as good coming up as it does going down and shared it with my family. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any ripe bananas to fill her request. Thank you for your wonderful, quick way to make it possible to grant her wish.
Happy Thanksgiving

I tried this today and it didn’t quite work out. The banana skins went dark black, but the bananas themselves had an odd odor and they tasted awful, not like bananas at all. I opted not to use them as I’m making a dessert for Christmas Day and want it to taste good Not sure what went wrong there.

Thanks a billion!!! i was a bit scared when i saw my big black banana but it was perfect for my banana walnut cookies! I wanted to make it for my brother who was coming the next day and i was worried because i forgot to get bananas. Thanks to your method i’m saved the time needed for bananas to ripen.

This works well, but like you said, the texture of the oven-ripened bananas is different – I find them so mushy that they’re really only good for banana bread or baking. I like slicing up bananas and putting them in the freezer but I could never do this with the ones I made in the oven, they were incredibly unappealing to me.

Hi, just used this trick to make some banana muffins. Putting them in the oven for an hour certainly made the bananas soft and easy to mash but they still tasted unripe; they hadn’t developed that rich banana flavor. So I wouldn’t recommend it for anything where the taste of the fruit isn’t really important.

Thank you SO much for this tip. I recently made Gluten-Free Coconut Flour Banana Bread Chocolate Chip Cookies and waited DAYS for my bananas to ripen up. It was like watching water boil. I mentioned your tip in my blog at http://www.theorganicrabbit.com.

[...] for weeks now, but I kept missing the window of ripe banana vs rotten banana. So…. today I found a little trick to get it just right: 1 hour in the oven at 300 degrees. You can see the photos in an earlier [...]

[...] Quick Tip – How to quickly ripen bananasMar 30, 2012 … So you have an urge to make something requiring overripe bananas, like banana bread, or my german chocolate cake. But you don’t have any … [...]

[...] for weeks now, but I kept missing the window of ripe banana vs rotten banana. So…. today I found a little trick to get it just right: 1 hour in the oven at 300 degrees. You can see the photos in an earlier [...]